One little-known fact about Indigenous people is that we excel at “counting coup” on our oppressors through the nonviolent resistance of satire. Why exert the energy to slay one’s enemies when one can laugh at them instead? The Crow multimedia artist Wendy Red Star understands the art of “Indi’n humor” as well as anyone, as evidenced by her cunning deployment of bigoted tropes in her 2014 series “White Squaw.”
Like many of Red Star’s projects, the series began when Red Star went down a Googling rabbit hole. She was interested in the etymology of the word “squaw,” an Algonquian term that had evolved into a derogatory label for Indigenous women. Last year, the Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, launched an initiative to rename places on federal lands where the word appears. Red Star took a different approach. Her Web search led her to a pulp-fiction series dating from the eighties and nineties titled “White Squaw,” featuring campy cover illustrations and outrageous subtitles and taglines—“Buckskin Bombshell: In a hot Texas canyon—she finds herself in the hands of some iron-hard men”; “Virgin Territory: She’s more than a handful for any man!”—that played on centuries-old captivity narratives embedded within the colonial imagination. Red Star bought up all twenty-four paperbacks in the series on eBay, scanned their covers, and replaced the original illustrations with self-portraits of her doing her best “Indian princess” burlesque.
“I come from a humorous background,” Red Star said in a 2016 interview, adding, “I’ve always seen things through this ironic lens. I’m always laughing.” Her self-portrait series “Four Seasons” (2006)—which she has said she made while watching the comedies of John Waters—features her, dressed in traditional Crow regalia, against landscapes that allude to the museum dioramas of Indigenous peoples often found in natural-history museums. Featuring plastic flora, Astroturf, inflatable animals, and other kitsch props, the scenes lampoon Westernized notions of the “noble savage” coexisting in harmony with nature, once again wryly thrusting the colonial gaze back on itself.
Red Star’s body of work encompasses a wide array of self-portraiture—often featuring constructed tableaux and theatrical poses reminiscent of Cindy Sherman—in addition to archival imagery, large-scale installations, performance art, sculptures composed of found objects, and stunning mixed-media collages showing photographed figures set against backgrounds of vivid textiles and beadwork. Born in 1981, in Billings, Montana, Red Star is the child of a white mother who worked for the Indian Health Service on the Crow Reservation, and a Crow father who was a game warden for the tribe. Her parents eventually split, and Red Star recalls spending weekends with her father, riding horses while he worked and ranched their land. After graduating from high school, which she attended just off the reservation, in Hardin, Red Star earned a bachelor of fine arts at Montana State University at Bozeman, then an M.F.A. in sculpture from U.C.L.A., where she studied under Catherine Opie and John Baldessari. Today her work is in the permanent collections of MOMA, the Met, the Whitney, and the British Museum, among others. A new book from Aperture and Documentary Arts, titled “Delegation,” represents the first comprehensive monograph of her work.
At the heart of Red Star’s artistic output is an inquisitive celebration of Crow culture. In 2014, another online research session led Red Star to a series of portraits of Crow chiefs taken in 1880, by Charles Milton Bell, on the occasion of their visit to Washington, D.C., to meet with the President. In an interview included in the new book, Red Star explains that she wanted viewers to understand that the various accoutrements the men posed with—brass rings, conch shells, an eagle-claw bracelet and eagle feathers—were meaningful expressions of Crow identity. To that end, she scribbled detailed notes on the portraits with a red-ink pen, some cheeky and imaginative, some sobering and historically relevant: “I can kick your ass with these eyes”; “My body sold to a collector for $500.00 and kept for 72 years at the American Museum of Natural History.” She noted, of her approach, “I wanted that red mark on history.”
Red Star credits a project called “Interference,” which she completed at Montana State University, as foundational to her artistic process. For it, she installed a number of tipis around the Bozeman campus, which sits on what was once Crow territory. After the first night, Red Star noticed that the poles had been knocked down, so she reinstalled them in a different location—only to have them knocked down again. Finally, she set up five tipis on the fifty-yard line of the football field. In the new book, Red Star recalls that a visiting professor remarked on her apparent interest in political provocation. “That was our territory. There was nothing political about it. It’s the truth,” Red Star says. “People tend to think a lot of my work is political, and I’m not offended by that. But, really, it’s just a fact. And, if that fact is political to you, then that’s interesting.”